Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge
Black Friday
Amber West
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Poet's Statement
My aim in "Black Friday" is to elegize Mr. Jdimytai Damour—a young Haitian-American Wal-Mart contractor who in 2008 was trampled to death by a mob of Long Island shoppers the morning after Thanksgiving—while considering American consumption from a first-person plural perspective. To explore and embody my own drowning in it rather than pretend I'm above or outside it. To consider my responsibility, our collective American responsibility, for the systemic exploitation and destruction of working class, women's, and black and brown bodies.